How does online PC gaming work?

Question

I have been a console gamer all my life, but about to venture into PC gaming, I am a big fan of online gaming. With consoles their is a unified network you connect to, but how would that work with PC games? I am talking Unreal Tournament, Crysis and counterstrike things like that. Not World of Warcraft.

Answer 1

In PC online gaming, depending on what game you are playing there are usualy hundreds of servers being hosted that you can join. Just start the game you wish to play, and click the multi-player option and you should get a server list of active games you can join. For counter strike, you go download the steam client that manages the game and servers. Open the client and click on "servers" for a server list. More info a steam and how to access the free download can be found on there website http://www.steampowered.com/v/index.php?...

Answer 2

For those types of games there are hundreds (or thousands) of private, dedicated servers hosted by the community.  The client just opens up a list of all the servers and you pick one.

Answer 3

Actually, on consoles, only XBox Live is a unified network. All other systems have had seperate online structures for each game.

PC is for the most part seperated as well, but some setups are strange hybrids. For example, Steam. It serves as a central program to managing the online functions of a variety of games including Counterstrike and Day of Defeat. Steam shows you the list of all the servers you can connect to, and also has some features to identify and auomatically ban cheats used in online games. However, the servers for these games are not centralized, and are instead each run by individuals.